The Reason Your Customer Service Team Won’t Stop Failing Despite Constant Training
Not long ago, I was stuck in yet another tedious support conference in Perth, listening to some expert go on about the significance of “exceeding customer expectations.” Same old presentation, same worn-out buzzwords, same total disconnect from actual experience.
I suddenly realised: we’re handling customer service training totally wrong.
The majority of courses begin with the idea that terrible customer service is a skills problem. Simply when we could show our team the right methods, all issues would suddenly get better.
What’s actually happening: following many years consulting with businesses across multiple states, I can tell you that skills isn’t the problem. The problem is that we’re expecting people to perform emotional labour without admitting the toll it takes on their mental health.
Here’s what I mean.
Customer service is fundamentally emotional labour. You’re not just resolving issues or handling requests. You’re taking on other people’s frustration, handling their worry, and miraculously maintaining your own psychological stability while doing it.
Conventional training entirely ignores this dimension.
Instead, it emphasises on superficial communications: how to address customers, how to apply encouraging words, how to follow organisational protocols. All valuable stuff, but it’s like training someone to cook by only describing the concepts without ever letting them near the kitchen.
This is a classic example. A while back, I was working with a significant phone company in Adelaide. Their client happiness scores were awful, and leadership was confused. They’d invested significant money in thorough training programs. Their team could quote organisational guidelines word-for-word, knew all the right phrases, and achieved perfectly on practice exercises.
But after they got on the customer interactions with actual customers, it all broke down.
Why? Because real service calls are messy, emotional, and loaded of factors that cannot be covered in a guidebook.
Once someone calls yelling because their internet’s been offline for 72 hours and they’ve failed to attend important professional appointments, they’re not focused in your upbeat introduction. They want authentic validation of their anger and instant action to solve their situation.
Most client relations training shows staff to conform to protocols even when those scripts are entirely inappropriate for the context. This creates fake interactions that frustrate clients even more and leave employees sensing helpless.
For this Adelaide organisation, we scrapped the majority of their previous training materials and started again with what I call “Psychological Truth Training.”
Before training responses, we taught stress management skills. Instead of focusing on organisational rules, we worked on understanding customer emotions and reacting effectively.
Essentially, we taught team members to identify when they were absorbing a customer’s anger and how to psychologically guard themselves without becoming disconnected.
The outcomes were instant and remarkable. Customer satisfaction numbers improved by 42% in eight weeks. But additionally notably, team turnover got better significantly. Staff actually commenced enjoying their jobs again.
Something else important problem I see repeatedly: courses that handle all customers as if they’re rational people who just need better interaction.
It’s unrealistic.
Following years in this business, I can tell you that roughly one in six of client contacts involve customers who are essentially difficult. They’re not angry because of a valid problem. They’re experiencing a terrible week, they’re struggling with personal problems, or in some cases, they’re just nasty humans who enjoy making others feel miserable.
Conventional customer service training won’t equip staff for these situations. Alternatively, it maintains the false idea that with adequate understanding and ability, each customer can be transformed into a pleased customer.
It puts massive pressure on client relations staff and sets them up for failure. When they can’t solve an encounter with an unreasonable client, they criticise themselves rather than understanding that some interactions are plainly unfixable.
One organisation I worked with in Darwin had implemented a rule that support people couldn’t terminate a call until the person was “totally happy.” Seems sensible in theory, but in practice, it meant that people were regularly held in extended calls with individuals who had no plan of getting satisfied regardless of what was provided.
This resulted in a environment of stress and inadequacy among support people. Employee satisfaction was astronomical, and the small number of employees who continued were exhausted and frustrated.
I changed their procedure to include definite protocols for when it was okay to courteously terminate an pointless interaction. That included training employees how to spot the warning signals of an impossible client and offering them with phrases to courteously disengage when needed.
Client happiness remarkably increased because employees were able to spend more productive time with people who actually required help, rather than being tied up with individuals who were just seeking to complain.
Currently, let’s discuss the obvious issue: performance measurements and their impact on customer service standards.
Nearly all organisations assess customer service performance using numbers like contact numbers, typical conversation time, and completion rates. These measurements totally contradict with providing good customer service.
Once you require customer service staff that they need manage specific quantities of interactions per shift, you’re essentially requiring them to hurry clients off the call as quickly as feasible.
This results in a essential opposition: you need excellent service, but you’re incentivising speed over completeness.
I worked with a significant bank in Sydney where support people were required to resolve interactions within an standard of four minutes. Four minutes! Try explaining a complicated banking situation and providing a adequate solution in 240 seconds.
Can’t be done.
What happened was that people would alternatively hurry through interactions missing adequately grasping the situation, or they’d transfer customers to multiple different departments to avoid extended calls.
Service quality was abysmal, and employee morale was even worse.
We collaborated with management to modify their evaluation measurements to emphasise on client happiness and single interaction success rather than speed. Certainly, this meant reduced calls per day, but customer satisfaction improved remarkably, and employee anxiety levels reduced considerably.
That takeaway here is that you won’t be able to separate support effectiveness from the organisational structures and targets that influence how staff work.
After decades of experience of training in this space, I’m certain that support isn’t about educating employees to be emotional sponges who absorb unlimited quantities of customer abuse while being pleasant.
It’s about establishing systems, processes, and atmospheres that support skilled, well-supported, mentally resilient staff to resolve genuine challenges for appropriate people while maintaining their own mental health and your company’s standards.
Any training else is just expensive window dressing that makes businesses seem like they’re handling client relations challenges without really addressing the real problems.
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